Want to Write Your Novel in LaTeX?

An utterly deranged* decision.

So did I.

This repository contains a template for writing fiction in LaTeX – not just novels, but anthologies; short stories; anything you might want – compiling to both PDF and e-reader-ready EPUB 3 formats, something for which weeks of research and a whole heap of boilerplate would normally be required. It sets a reasonable default style, and aims to be customizable.

As an added bonus, it lets you track your writing via Git, the benefits of which I hardly need to extol if you’ve found your way here!

* ⁠Though in reality, it turns out to be surprisingly practical!

How to Use

In preparation, you will need:

• Visual Studio Code as your editor.

• The LaTeX Workshop extension for VS Code.

• Though optional, the LTeX+ extension for VS Code is useful for checking spelling and grammar.

• An installation of LaTeX, specifically LuaTeX. There are several LaTeX distributions, but the main players are MiKTeX and TeX Live. The former is smaller but more fussy, while the latter is enormous but has… everything included.

• An installation of Perl. You may already have it installed – run perl -v on the command line to check. If you’re on Windows, I recommend Strawberry Perl.

• A rogues’ gallery of LaTeX packages, but you should either already have those included with your distribution, or you should be prompted to install them in medias res. The one package you may need to install manually is TeX4ebook – see your distribution’s instructions for installing packages.

To begin writing, simply make a copy of Book/template.tex, add your new file to the list of source files in book.tex, and start typing away. …Oh, and you should probably remove the example chapters. By default, this repository is set up for long-form fiction split into multiple files, but if you want to write something shorter, there’s nothing stopping you from typing directly into (and renaming!) book.tex.

The build flow works as such: Whenever you save a chapter, that chapter will be automatically built as a PDF, so that you may preview it (semi-)live. To build the whole book, open book.tex (it matters which file is open!), press Ctrl + Shift + P to open the command palette, and run Latex Workshop: Build with recipe. In the next menu, select whether you want to build a PDF or an EPUB. The resulting file will be output as book.pdf or book.epub, respectively.

If I may make a suggestion, keeping your writing ⁠/ plotting notes in an Obsidian vault in the same folder works wonders – it makes your notes trackable via Git alongside your writing as well.

Customization

You’ll likely want to configure various metadata and typographical options. They can be added and edited primarily in these places:

• The .tex files in configuration/ (preamble.tex, packages.tex, fonts.tex, style.tex, and text-commands.tex) contain all the LaTeX code that will appear before the document in every LaTeX file. Here’s where you add packages, change options, style the PDF, and generally write LaTeX code.

• Replace Images/cover.jpeg to set the cover image for the book.

• Out of the box, this template is set to use American English. To change this, change the line \usepackage[USenglish]{babel} in configuration/packages.tex, the line "ltex.language": "en-US", in .vscode/settings.json, and the line \Configure{DocumentLanguage}{en-US} in configuration/xhtml-config.cfg. For example, to switch to British English, change them to \usepackage[UKenglish]{babel}, "ltex.language": "en-GB",, and \Configure{DocumentLanguage}{en-GB} respectively.

• configuration/xhtml-style.css lets you style the EPUB using CSS.

• configuration/xhtml-config.cfg contains the TeX4Ht configuration – i.e. the configuration for EPUB output. Among other things, it lets you set metadata (title, contributors, ISBN…) and add fonts.

• configuration/xhtml-code.cfg contains more TeX4Ht configuration, but is intended to contain the more technical side of things – custom HTML code certain LaTeX elements are translated into, for example. Hopefully, you won’t have to mess with this at all.

Note that the styles of the PDF version and the EPUB version are almost entirely separate – think of it as “LaTeX style goes for the PDF; CSS style goes for the EPUB.”

The code/ directory belongs to code inherent to the template – you likely won’t have to look in there unless you want to contribute to this repository.

Special Commands

As this is LaTeX, you can make your own macros as willy-nilly as you want, but the template ships with some commands that are particularly handy for writing fiction. You can dig into the custom ones in configuration/text-commands.tex, but for your convenience, allow me to introduce a few:

• \chapter{Chapter Title} will start a new numbered chapter complete with heading, while \chapter*{Chapter Title} will do the same but unnumbered (for example useful for \chapter*{Prologue}).

• \scene will create a scene break – i.e., leave a line blank before the next paragraph.

• \sectionbreak will create a section break with an asterism. It’s like a scene break, but even more prominent.

• We have three different kinds of italics! I recommend using these over LaTeX’s default \textit.

  • \em{emphasized text} creates italics in the PDF version, and <em> tags (which are also italic) in the EPUB ⁠/ HTML versions.
  • \italic{italicized text} creates italics in the PDF version, and <i> tags (which are italic) in the EPUB ⁠/ HTML versions.
  • \titalic{two-letter ISO language code}{some title} creates italics in the PDF version, and <cite> tags (which are italic) in the EPUB ⁠/ HTML versions. For example, \titalic{ja}{Sōten no Shiroki Kami no Za} renders as <cite lang="ja-Latn">Sōten no Shiroki Kami no Za</cite>.

  The Mozilla Developer Network summarizes the differences between these as following:

  [T]he visual result is the same. However, the semantic meaning is different. The <em> element represents stress emphasis of its contents, while the <i> element represents text that is set off from the normal prose, such as a foreign word, fictional character thoughts, or when the text refers to the definition of a word instead of representing its semantic meaning. (The title of a work, such as the name of a book or movie, should use <cite>.)

• \footnote{Blah blah blah…} will create a footnote.

• \href{https://example.com}{link text} will create a web link.

Minutiæ

This template makes some minor typographical decisions – it assumes that you won’t want linebreaks before en and em dashes, for one, and it sets em dashes surrounded by two hair spaces (“a ⁠— b” instead of “a—b”).

What it does not do is automate “smart” typography. For deeply nerdy reasons, this template delegates that to you, the typist: You’ll have to decide if you want to use spaced en dashes, em dashes, smart quotes, dumb quotes, or what have you. My suggestion for typing these is a compose key (on Windows, that’s WinCompose), but of course, you can also use LaTeX or Babel graphemes such as ``, '', --, and ---.

Contributions

This template can certainly be made better, more user-friendly, and more versatile. Do you have LaTeX experience and wish to help out your fellow apex-nerd writers? Feel free to submit issues and pull requests to this repo! Typographical improvements, accessibility improvements, features, and ease-of-use improvements are all welcome.

At the moment, it’s made for a build flow centered around VS Code, but that’s only because it happens to be what I use – if you want to add support for alternative tooling, be my guest!

Acknowledgements

I could not possibly have put this together without the help of Michal Hoftich (@michal-h21), the maintainer of TeX4ebook and Make4ht (and honorary maintainer of TeX4ht, if I’m to be honest), who tirelessly answers everybody’s questions about the software on the TeX Stack Exchange, and adds fixes and compatibility workarounds upstream in real time as needed. It’s not the most user-friendly software in the world (heck, it’s LaTeX – what do you expect), but user-friendliness matters less when you have a wonderful man to help you out personally.

Contact

Having written a good bit of fiction in LaTeX, I now possess arcane answers to the most abstruse of questions. If you want help with this template, feel free to hit me up on BlueSky. My direct messages are open!

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Go forth ⁠— write righteously and egregiously.
— ⁠Molly